


Tired

by They_Have_No_Shame



Category: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Future Fic, One-Sided Attraction, Unresolved Emotional Tension, oh hell yeah angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-02 22:34:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21168959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/They_Have_No_Shame/pseuds/They_Have_No_Shame
Summary: Everything doesn't stay like she left it.MILD SPOILERS IF YOU HAVEN'T CAUGHT UP WITH THE MANGA.





	Tired

**Author's Note:**

> saddd that the anime isn't as popular as it should be, cuz the manga is a freaking bomb and a really good read. obv Kohaku is my favorite owo girl so this one is dedicated to her!

The gentle breeze through lush foliage and the smell of fresh greens made it bearable for Kohaku to climb the steep, curvy pathway through trees with a dead boar on her back. She was lucky that the beast had stumbled upon her, otherwise she would have come uninvited without food. Again.

She frownded, wondering on why exactly he was living so far away. It wasn’t like he was uninvited in their village – he was their chief, after all –, but, with cities bustling and people easily going about their days now, she guessed that the general public just hated that there were random experiments flying in through their windows. Or a sudden explosion. Or a sudden random experiment flying in through their window that also exploded.

Okay, _maybe_ she knew the reason – but why this far? This was even further than the place she had to get the hotspring water from for Ruri-nee. It was even ridiculous on thinking how he got any materials; the cars couldn’t drive up such a steep hill. And he wasn’t a muscly gorilla himself. It just boggled her mind that he was the smartest man alive, but lived in a stupidly inconveniet area.

As the last of the dirt pathway faded, Kohaku stepped out from the bushes and into a green field encircled by trees. In front of her, a little distance away, was a two story house and a medium shed close by. She could hear a trickling stream behind the house as she walked closer, inspecting for any signs of life.

One revealed itself by stepping outside the shed. His familiar outfit and distinguishable hair gave Kohaku a lighter step, pulling the boar off her back.

“Visiting so soon?”

Kohaku gave a one-shoulder shrug. “Escaping.”

Senku scoffed with a grin, leading her away from the shed and inside the house. It had a second floor, but the size was just big enough for one person’s living. The upper level wasn’t even furnished – just a giant telescope sticking out of the domed roof. He lead her towards the barely used kitchen and crouched down to a door leading to the cellar. As he climbed down and turned on the lights, Kohaku leaned in the opening to pass the boar to him. He received it with a huff, knees trembling from the hefty weight. She didn’t use the ladder; instead, she acrobatically dived inside and went to help him skin the tusked beast.

It was done quickly - separating the fur, legs, meat and innards and setting everying inside his ‘_refrigerator_’, if she remembered what he called it, and climbing back up to walk back to his lab. “Was it the village girls again?” he asked, going to the table laid out in the middle with another ongoning test on it.

“Nope,” she smiled as she followed, inspecting if anything new was in his little science bubble. “Ruri-nee this time. Honestly, she almost got me – she whipped Suika out of thin air! I’m suspecting that Gen is somehow in this as well...”

“Ah, tactical cuteness,” he snickered while inspecting a glass vial with a pretty, light blue liquid inside it. Kohaku couldn’t help but inch closer, piqued by everything new - old for him, probably - he reveals. “I appreciate the gift, but you can’t use my home like a bomb shelter.”

Her eyes widen from hearing a new word. “_’Bomb shelter’_?” she only knows of the mild chemical bombs he had produced, but she had confidence that they wouldn’t harm her that much. “No, your place is more than somewhere I can hide away.”

“Oh?” his tone was everying but interest in wanting to know her view on his humble abode. “Then what is it?”

Kohaku rolled her eyes, but her heart twinged for less than a second. Strange, it seems to happen more often now. Yet she has, bewildering herself, conducted _research_ on this phenomenon. Experiments – in what circumstances this happened, at what time, how often, how long, so and so. She had concluded that they most often occured whenever Senku gave even a slight moment of his precious attention to her. In spite of the feeling being like a sharp thorn plunging in her chest and sending small, electric jolts through her every nerve, it felt... _good_.

She seriously thought over if she wasn’t a closeted masochist.

“It’s...” her eyes wandered on every shelve brimming full with glass containers, watching how her image changed based on the shape of the flask. All the different things they contained: liquid, sand, some kind of slush, rocks, things preserved in a water that had a specific name, and, oh look, more rocks. They all were an entire different world for Senku, but, to her, they were still things she could probably live with without knowing every molecular structure of. Grass is green, the sky is blue – easy as that. And yet, she enjoyed watching Senku ask _why_ is that so.

She smiles as she picks up an intertwined, glittery metal. “It’s sciency.”

He turned his head to confusedly pity her. “Is that an insult or is your vocabulary limited?”

She spitefully turned her head away, somewhat angry, somewhat shameful. “No! I just can’t explain it better,” she defends while twisting the object in her hands. It had little lines and circles all around it, places where there were small, sharp points jutting out, and tiny, _tiny_ screws holding it all together. She couldn’t believe that this was the cause of the problem – the whole thousand year petrification. Yet, when she lifted it up to the lightbulb to watch it sparkle even more, she couldn’t stop pondering:

_Is she allowed to be happy that humanity got petrified and she had the chance to meet him?_

Senku janks the shiny bobble out of her hand. “I’m still trying to figure it out.” Kohaku puckers her lips in a pout, but quickly turns towards the entrance of his little hut. She leans on in the doorway, observing the overgrowth surrounding the place, hiding it from the society booming not too far away.

He never changed – when they defeated the one behind the petrification and started to rebuild modern technology from zero, he still was the same as the first time she met him. Although, if she thought hard enough back, she could pin-point the moments where the people around him – the people he _saved_ – had influenced him. Little by little, he changed, morphed, _modified_, if she used his words, in the man he is today.

She watched him lead: not only her tribe, but everyone that supported his cause. He might have done it for the manpower he so craved at the starting point, but later on, she could see the hidden kindness he had towards, well, _everything_! Even when the person was a foe, he never used his science in a way that would end in a death. Senku was simply not that kind of scientist.

But it did take a toll.

Kohaku glanced over her shoulder at the tired, hunched over back of Senku Ishigami. She saw the exhausted bags he had under his eyes, the droopy, greasy hair that didn’t stick up to its full leek potentional, the staggering his feet made. She was sure he would easily fall down like a weak tree if he only stumbled on the table’s leg.

“When we first me,” she started, pushing her back off the doorway and trailing back inside, avoiding the places where she knew the floorboards were creaky, “didn’t you tell me to not use my energy wastefully?”

He jumped when he finally registered how close she was, the stealth of a lioness having brought her close enough to pointedly stare at him. Much to her annoyance, he turned his head away every time she tried to look him in the eye. Eye twitching and just about having enough of his stubbornness, she walks around the table to stand straight across him. She hopes she isn’t too heavy and leans on the table, careful to not push any vials and other sciency knick knacks over, and makes him bend himself back in surprise, their faces so close she could see the reflection of her in his eyes like a mirror.

“You need to _rest_,” she says commandigly. His eye twitches but says nothing. She could see he wanted to do a one-eighty and continue his experiment on the floor if he had to, but, as she guessed, it was not possible with this one if the gloves and glasses told her anything. He even placed the beakers he was holding further away from her.

Their eyes were in a stare-down – a silent word argument between them. He finally showed her the true lenght of his exhaustion when he broke the contact. “Let me finish and then I will rest.”

“Finish, and then rest,” she repeated.

\---

Her head lies against the tree’s thick trunk, high up in its branches, hidden in the crown. She had found a great opening to see the stars, if a little bit cold. To think that humans had at one point the capability to travel up there, see how the light bends around their planet. Well, that’s what Senku had told her anyway. It sounded like a fantasy to be able to hide the Earth behind your thumb. But the times she had visited him, and he had opened up more about his past, she found herself drawn to his stories like when Ruri-nee told the One Hundred Tales.

They were enticing due to the lack of his rambling on about _gabbro_, _migmatite_, _rhyolite_, and other types of _rocks_.

“Why are you still here?” a voice called from bellow. She clutched around the thick bark to lean over and peek at a tiny Senku, illuminated by the bonfire she had started, frowning up at her.

“From seeing how tired you were, I hadn’t thought that you would even wake up for at least a day,” she hollered back, easily leaping down the tree, gracefully jumping from branch to branch until she thumped down in front of the scientist. Hands proudly set on her hips, she relishes the way the fire’s light gave an amber glint in his eyes; they don’t look as dead as before. “I took a leg from the boar to eat before I go, but we can share,” just then Senku’s stomach growly, and she smiles mockingly at his eye-roll. She goes to sit near the fire to rotate the leg over her makeshift – _primitive_, in Senku’s words – roasting jack. He sat near her with plenty of space to not be imposing.

They don’t converse – one had just woken up and the other one is drowsy, despite how she holds herself. They let bonfire be their utterer, soaking up its flickering warmth as it crackled. But it was hard for Kohaku. It wasn’t the peaceful aether that she craved for between them, and, having been only with her thoughts and unsaid words for some hours now, overthinking them in her jumbled mind, she turns to him and speaks up.

“I like this place because it’s yours.”

His ruby red irises stared in her’s, slowly blinking. “If I hadn’t just woken up, I might start believing you have feeling for me. You know what I think of relationships.”

She backed away, her heart painfully tugging towards him, but her mind repeating to her that he never changes. _They_ never change. Their friendship had always been a constant back and forth loop – he instructs, she responds. From the start, it had been for Ruri-nee; then to defeat Tsukasa and protect humanity from losing centuries gathered knowlage; followed by finally finding the source of the petrification and putting a close to the mystery.

Now that loop is all wiggly, and Kohaku doesn’t even know if it is a loop anymore. Since the day Senku had provided enough knowlage, and the newfound human cities were thriving, she found herself lost. He didn’t give her anymore instructions, no new ideas to draw out and bake with manpower or in any other sadistic method he had. She doesn’t think that she’s thirsty for the adventure – there is still plenty if you travel far enough from the bustling cities. But it did give a nostalgic wave that washed over her now and then.

Would Kaseki be disappointed in seeing all his craftsmanship being stored in a house for everyone to observe? Or roll in happiness that they had once paved the way for new, improved technology.

Are Taiju and Yuzuriha sad that they can’t meet with their friend so often anymore? Or are they enjoying going back to their lives that were snatched away from them so many years ago, now being able to build a family together.

Is everyone in her village truly comfortable with their new, many neighbours and wires on their houses, and four-wheeled speed demons rolling around? Or are they blissful that they now are acquainted to more than the usual faces they saw every day, and that technology has eased their everyday lives.

No, she guesses that that loop, that wiggle, had disappeared the moment the secret behind the petrficiation tool was discovered. It turned out to really be science, and, coincidentally, their last collective roadmap to scientific supremacy. Even so, why couldn’t it be more simpler.

“I don’t. We’re friends, Senku,” it felt sick to say those words. They held back the true churning that was happening in the pits of her stomach, trying to sound right enough to be pleasant to the ears. They spent such a long time together that it hurt to slowly see everyone move on, as if saving humanity was a deed they just had to complete. “I just liked having fun when we were all together,” at least she could spit something genuine out.

He regards her for a while longer before responding: “I see.” He turns back to watch the sizzling flame lick at the boar leg, giving the tinder aroma a spicy complement with the added seasonings.

They sit there; under a dark sky full of faraway dreams, a nigtly forest song from the deepest hollows, a chilly breeze that nips to shuffle closer to the fire.

Her eyes droop from watching the constant circling of the skewer, the warmth and light that sheltered and encompassed. She doesn’t really understand why she stayed here. Senku had fallen asleep, and she... wandered around his home lika a lost spirit. Checking the lab – like he left it; going up to the second floor – cold and mute; going down to the stream – the generator was still running. Honestly, outside of the poorly managed food stock, he was living quite fine by himself. She felt kind of shitty for coming over so often without reason. No, wait, the village girls – and now Ruri-nee – were partly at fault, but it very much was the fact that incorrigible men were asking her out. She just wanted peace.

“Me too.”

Kohaku almost missed the quiet mumble. “Huh?” she sleepily tilts her head towards Senku.

“If you take away the danger of _dying_, then, yeah, it was fun,” he picks his fingers, scarred and rough from the chemicals and minerals he so lovingly studied. “But things have to evolve to survive, and we can’t always stay in a constant loop.”

She sluggishly blinks at him, eyelids heavy as lead.

“Do you have enough room for someone to stay over?”

He thoughtfully scrunched his brows. “I have the basement.”

“I’ll stay in the tree,” she wobbly stood up and plucked off the the cooked meat with her knife.

“Kidding! I have a second room-“ Kohaku brutally yet precicely rips the meat in two, stray bits flying everwhere and one even manages to land on Senku’s forehead. She contemplates before handing the bigger piece to him. “Ruthless...” he cautiously takes it, watching as she moves further away from him, embracing her legs and sullenly biting at the juicy flesh, glaring at the fire. He looks down at the torn meat in his hand and sigh, rubbing his hair. “You can stay, I don’t mind that much, but I’ll have to clean out the storage room and-“

“No, I’m going to live here with you.”

His jaw slacks. “I really don’t have enough room for two.”

“As I said, I’ll live in the tree.”

He grimaced. “I’m not great at providing food.”

“It’s fine. I’ll hunt for us,” she said it without a pause, as if these were words that she has recited to herself for years. “You said it yourself: we can’t stay in a constant loop,” she pointedly looks at him, the way his eyes are unsure. But, watching closer, there was a hidden gratefulness. Of what – she can only guess; greedily hope that for once the flames are not playful jesters but encouraging guiders.

“Okay,” he quietly whispers his answer, and it’s the first time she’s seen him with such a kind smile. “I’d appreciate the manpower.”

Kohaku rolls her eyes. Of course he would.

“And the company.”

Her eyes widen from that statement. Her heart might as well be punching itself from the pure _excitement_ of those words. “Senku...”

“But you need to sleep since you look like a tired hog.”

She shoves him in the grass.

**Author's Note:**

> cut to days later where everyone in the village panic on the whereabouts of Kohaku, while Gen sleazily sips on his cola, watching the ongoing chaos


End file.
